The better I come to know people, the more I love my dog.
~ Frederick the Great
To love the whole world
For me is no chore
My only real problem’s
My neighbor next door.
~ C. W. Vanderberch
Some Christians are harder to get along with than a bale of barbed wire.
~ Unknown
Kindness is the golden chain by which society is held together.
~ Goethe
He who cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself.
~ George Herbert
When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
~ Abraham Joshua Heschel
It is easier to love humanity than to love your neighbor.
~ Eric Hoffer, in an interview with Eric Severeid on CBS, November 14, 1967
Down in their hearts, wise men know this truth: the only way to help yourself is to help others.
~ Elbert Hubbard
I will not permit any man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
~ Booker T. Washington.
According to the Arabic proverb, there is no such things as a Phoenix, a Ghoul, or a True Bosom Friend; but I say to you that I found them all among my neighbors.
~ Kahlil Gibran
Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
~ Thomas ‘a Kempis
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
~ G.K. Chesterton
What is hateful to thyself do not do to another. This is the whole Law, the rest is Commentary.
~ in Babylonian Talmud
Tell me how much you know of the sufferings of your fellow men and I will tell you how much you have loved them.
~ Helmut Thielicke
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MENDING WALL
Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
